Clerking 4
Teaching
I am teaching you, the patron, all the time, like you’re a
puppy. It is a series of small gestures, educational, poised at the edge of
your consciousness. I don’t really have any business teaching you and so my
lessons must be untraceable. But I also must run my desk as smoothly as
possible, with efficiency. Also, of course, I want to make things a little more
how I like them, I’m there a lot, so, I teach you.
The DVD sleeves you hand me I put in numeric order, with a
slight touch of drama, right before you. This says you could have, if you
wanted to help, done this. I could have organized with less flare, but I never
ever do because this is a reminder I feel you can always use, whatever you
decide to do with it. This may be your only lesson, but for me it will just be
one of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, I hand out in an average clerking day.
You’re a helpful person, or you like to be. You stack all of
your videos open faced so I don’t have to open them to scan the barcode.
Unfortunately, I have always felt a mostly irrational hatred for this. I take a
half second to cleanse my soul and then, completely without rancor, I gently
and swiftly restack the videos normally, but slow down ever so slightly to scan
the one video with the barcode on the cover, the one you had stacked so I would
have had to close the video first.
You wait in my line even though you have no holds or DVDs,
so I tell you that you could have used, if you like, the self checkout machines
and not had to wait. You tell me that you prefer the personal touch. I divest
myself of all personality in order to complete the transaction.
Let’s look at the check in desk. We are, generally speaking,
the busiest library in my state so it’s a long one, most often filled with books.
You drop your returns haphazardly on one of our more crowded desks and I will
drop anything I can to neaten them or prevent an avalanche. Depending on what
you did and how I responded, even within this, I may be teaching any number of
variations on a basic lesson. You may have been only slightly careless and the
stack delicate already and the pile in need of my help just as it was. This is
me saying, gently, only barely, take care, friend. It is also saying, aren’t we
rather overworked here? Just look at those librarians over there on the
internet doing nothing. Or you may have strewn your returns sloppily in a way
that requires no real emergency attention, but creates a bad base for the
people coming after you. My (partly unnecessary) rush is a more strongly worded
lesson and a bit of an admonition as well. If you interrupted me from trying to
read the inner flap of an appealing looking book I may look particularly
terrified as I appear to clutch your stack of items back from possibly killing
someone. Or, lastly, you may have hurled your unstable mass of materials on
teetering towers of ill placed and crowded returns causing some havoc and a
small avalanche. I rush to this in high drama. You can temper the deep lesson
you’re about to receive here through swift and profound apology and numerous
recognitions of our put upon state and how you’re making it so much worse. You
could, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen that happen. What you do generally in
this situation is speak in the passive case. “Wow, this is a mess!” You might
even make feeble allusions to how there’s no room for any returns and how you
couldn’t find a parking spot. Then you’ll make some attempts to stem the
avalanche. Here is where my experience comes in. By straightening a few
particular piles and moving a couple strategic items on my side of the desk I
can gloriously amplify every spatial and balancing error you’re making until
your children are knee deep in books and audio visual materials. At this point,
because all the fallen items are at your feet on your side of the counter you
are forced to admit, sort of, that you knocked them off the desk. I can afford
to become magnanimous at this point, and I tell you how it’s really no problem,
and how I’ll take care of it. You learn that the library really is very busy;
that you don’t really know how to stack books, and that these harried people
are quite kind really.
Or you don’t learn it. Let’s go back to those DVD check outs.
You have near your full check out limit of 20, many of them full seasons of TV
shows, so you have well over one hundred hours of TV watching there. I think
many hostile thoughts towards you and then begin, loudly, and with a strong
initial hostility, to sort your copious DVD sleeves on the counter between us.
I rather push the line of acceptable teaching, but I know I can, because I know
you won’t be learning anything here anyway. I know because you come here pretty
much every day. I know because you’re a teacher too. You have taught me that
you’re very lonely and that you are not very bright and that you watch a lot of
TV. And you have taught me that I am a clerk and my job is to check out your
DVDs. So I do. And it’s a little tiresome, but it’s okay. And I talk with you
about the weather, which is always pretty interesting around here.
I think I am the person with the barcodes all facing outward, looking for a personal touch. I'll talk about the weather anytime over self-checkout. We need to keep as many jobs as possible.
ReplyDeleteI really don't fault you, and for me that barcode era has passed anyway with the advent of rfid. Nevertheless I will say there's lot's of good reasons to come on over for the personal touch and I'm happy to see you, but I think its nicer to leave the rote work to the machines if you can. Jobs were getting sliced down before many of these machines were making a difference where I work, and I don't see a social advantage to people doing simple, repetitive tasks a machine can do faster and more cheaply, better we institute 30 hour work weeks, or have more time for staff to help people or both. As to your barcode facing you're probably doing it right. You can always ask.
DeleteBefore I made the transition to academic libraries, I would get frustrated with public library patrons refusing to use self-checks because they were trying to "save my job"...The reason our library installed self check machines was because our clerks and library assistants were overworked and they couldn't afford additional staffing. They hoped that by installing self check machines, that the decrease in rote work would enable the paraprofessionals to actually finish their other work.
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly! I even wrote a post about that, clerking 6 http://www.clerkmanifesto.com/2013/03/clerking-6.html
Deletehmm, don't know if that's a link without cutting and pasting, but then you've already lived it and actually put it rather succinctly. This first self check happened a long time ago at our library and managerially at the time they seemed to be compelled to replace the saved work with new work, but eventually the savings in work kicked in heavily and was only good.